Harris takes a populist tone on the economy. Will it help with young voters?

Polling shows young voters care about the cost of housing

Vice President Kamala Harris struck a decidedly populist tone when she unveiled her economic policy in Raleigh, North Carolina on Friday.

The vice president made housing the core part of her policy rollout, pledging to build three million new homes. As part of that, she has proposed a tax incentive to build starter homes. This comes as nearly 1 in 10 homes are now worth more than $1 million, which is a record high.

Harris also proposed providing a $25,000 payment support to help people buy a home for the first time.

“There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up,” she said on Friday. “We also know that as the price of housing has gone up, the size of down payments have gone up as well. Even if aspiring homeowners save for years, it often still is not enough.”

The policy rollout comes just as Harris will head to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. Much of the focus has been on whether she will face a revolt from younger voters because of her and President Joe Biden’s support for Israel amid its war with Hamas that has led to thousands of deaths in Gaza. Indeed, Harris has confronted protesters at some of her early rallies, to varying levels of success.

But as Inside Washington has noted before, polling has shown that young voters tend to prioritize the economy, particularly the cost of living and housing, while not nearly as many consider the war in Gaza to be of similar salience. Indeed, when The Independent interviewed Black voters in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention before Biden stepped aside, they cited inflation and “high as hell” rent as primary reasons for dissatisfaction with Democrats.

Harris’s decision to make housing a core part of her first major economic policy rollout shows that she sees it as a winning issue in November.

Lee Miringoff, the director for the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, told The Independent that Harris is trying to combine the new-found energy that her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has given the party with policies focused around potential Democratic voters who may have wandered away because of a hypothetical rematch between Biden and Donald Trump.

“So there's no doubt that young people have concerns about inflation and their ability to also become homeowners,” Miringoff said. “Harris is trying to take that on front and center to to show that it's not just that she's young, more energetic and new generation and all that, but that she's also got some policies that she would like to put forth.”

Harris’s decision to deliver the speech in Raleigh is not an accident either. North Carolina has had an influx of residents moving in from states like California and New York, which have exorbitant housing prices.

Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, said that the housing market has never fully recovered from either the 2008 housing crisis – which led to Harris suing big banks as California attorney general – and the boom in housing purchases during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when mortgage rates dropped before they went back up and made housing unaffordable.

“So even though the Biden-Harris administration can point to a lot of successes in the economy, the housing market is the glaring problem,” she told The Independent. “And because it's, you know, the American dream to own a home, it's something that really does matter if you're going to claim success on the economy.”

Republicans for their part have tried to talk about the cost of housing. But Republicans like Kari Lake, who is running for Senate in Arizona, have sought to blame illegal immigration for the rising costs.

Trump for his part has offered few solutions on housing. While he has said his administration would “target everything from car affordability to housing affordability to insurance costs to supply chain issue[s],” he has offered little in terms of specifics.

On top of that, during a rally in Bozeman, Montana, he pledged “There will be no low income developments built in areas right next to your house.” During his nonsensical press conference on Thursday where he displayed boxes of Cheerios, bacon and coffee, he offered little in terms of specifics to counteract inflation.

“Definitely some race and class connotations there,” Fairweather told The Independent about Trump’s rhetoric on housing. “It's definitely more of a fear mongering message than one of tackling the problem. So definitely different approaches.”

At the same time, Fairweather said that there is a divide in how coastal voters think about housing affordability compared to swing state voters.